Marketing Consultant, Speaker & Author

4 posts from April 2012

In this week's Five for Friday, let's take a look at social media from the perspectives of a member of traditional media's old guard, a B2B marketer, a media futurist, and a media buyer. Plus we'll look at an interesting take on why companies should focus less on what's next and do a better job of handling what's now. Put it all together, and you've got "marketing through the looking glass" -- everything looks kinda familiar but nothing is quite what it seems.

Here are some of my favorite reads and interesting ideas for the week ending April 27th, 2012.

Inside the AP’s Social Strategy Great look into how a veteran of traditional media has moved into social. They’re not just present on Facebook and Twitter (with more than 20 accounts); they actually have a micro-targeted strategy for each to clearly govern their respective uses. They’re not using social to simply push out information to readers -- depending on the account and platform, they also gather resources and engage their audience. But perhaps most importantly, they view social media as a deadly serious requirement of the new media world, and staff those accounts accordingly. The AP’s guidelines for social include Facebook for engagement, Twitter for breaking news, neither platform gets the story first -- it still hits the wires before social, a rule the AP calls “sacrosanct.” Obviously even in a digital and social world, traditional has it's place -- and the AP has well-defined rules for how the pieces fit together.

How B2B Marketers Are Succeeding With Social Media Marketing If this headline surprises you, start worrying. Social Media Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report gives a good overview of how social media is being used by marketers, but more interestingly it points to how business-to-business marketers -- often thought to be lagging consumer brands -- are actually beating out B2C marketers in terms of social media success. B2B marketers are seeing across-the-board 10% lifts over their B2C counterparts in generating new business partnerships, achieving improved search rankings, and gathering marketplace insights as a direct result of social media use. If your're a B2C marketer, maybe you can learn some social media lessons from your vendors. And if you're a B2B marketing who hasn't yet begun using social as a serious business tool, maybe you need to start yesterday.

Five Ways To Weaponize Your Brand Storytelling So you have fans and followers. So what? Top-flight media futurist Mike Walsh says the real business value lies not in the numbers but in your ability to get those fans and followers to talk about the stories you’ve curated around your brand. Get people interested enough in a story and they’ll share it with all of their friends and followers. Here’s how: Track and understand which stories get the most attention, and whether that attention translates to new customers. Deeply research your customers’ lives and the types of stories they’re already telling--then you’ll know how your brand fits into their social storytelling. Leverage new platforms (like Pinterest) if you can do it in a way that makes sense for your brand and the social lives of your customers. And if you’re going to reach for the world’s attention, be prepared to know what matters to your customers locally (even if "local" is halfway across the globe from where you sit).

Why Digital Ad Forecasts Are Irrelevant: The Future Is Not Display Ads If you work in the business, you've seen plenty of those studies that project just how big the digital display ad spend will grow over the coming 3, 4, or even 5 years. This article suggests that those numbers are totally irrelevant. Not because predicting the future is turning into something of a fool's errand, but because the future of advertising has little to do with display ads as we know them today. People are spending huge amounts of time on social sites that eschew standard IAB display units in favor of "native formats" (Facebook Sponsored Stories, Tumblr posts, Twitter's promoted tweets and trends, branded content, etc.) What does this mean for marketers? Simple: say goodbye to one-size-fits-all advertising. It’s now a requirement to appeal to your customers by acting like them--participating in social spheres of influence, building an audience and creating content (see “Five Ways to Weaponize Your Brand Storytelling” above), and presenting that content through paid media placements and earned media opportunities that integrate seamlessly into each social site's network experience. And be prepared to change course at a moment's notice. So what’s the future of digital advertising?

The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas This one would be a big idea, if only it weren't so obvious. Oh -- but being obvious in this instance is actually a very good thing. When most of us set out to innovate, we are so concerned with hitting on a proverbial A HA! moment. But in doing so, we just might be missing out on the regular, simple stuff (on the mundane and the obvious stuff) that really matters. Just because your customers are giving you direct feedback about new wants they hadn't even realized they had and endorsing innovative features they’d love to have in theory, that doesn’t mean your brand should ignore the obvious patterns about what they currently do and like right now. Here's the catch. If you're missing the obvious little things, chances are so is everyone else. And that means there's an unaddressed (or at least under-served) need waiting to be satisfied. Sometimes the best way to truly innovate (not merely invent the new, but create real value for your customers) is to focus on the near-in easy asks and answer them better than anyone else.

My client Chirpify is having a damn good day, today. The company, which "turns tweets into transactions" by letting any organization or individual link their Twitter and PayPal accounts to conduct super simple social commerce in 140-characters or less, just closed a $1.3 million Series A round. If that's not enough, they're also rolling out a new solution that allows entertainment companies and independent artists to use Chirpify to offer digital downloads of songs and electronic tickets straight over Twitter too. So now labels and artists can come up with all sorts of creative ways to directly monetize their followers. Cool.

Chirpify's CEO, Chris Teso, thinks his company's new capabilities just might be enough to chip away at iTunes and Ticketmaster. He just might be right. In fact, Chirpify's opportunity is even bigger than that. They just might have cracked the code on monetizing social media. They're all about seamless social commerce that is big, noisy, and actually works.

Big congratulations to Chirpify -- and to mobile accelerator Upstart Labs (also a client), who provided Chirpify with seed capital and access to services like ours.

In a new feature that I hope to keep up each Friday, I'll take a look back at the week and summarize five stories I found newsworthy, noteworthy, insightful, interesting, or just plain fun to read. We'll do this to keep ourselves on our game, and to help keep you on yours. Oh, and to save you the effort of having to filter through the 5,000 unread items in your Google Reader.

Let's call this regular feature Five For Friday. And here are my picks for the week ending Friday, April 20, 2012.

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future We have reached the tipping point in tech advancement--but what do we do now? The article is an interesting rundown of major breakthroughs in the past decades and how they’ve altered our lives. The focus is on why we’ve stopped innovating with all these great toys we have at our disposal, and while Atlantic contributor Alexis Madrigal sheds necessary light on the problems, a clear solution never really crops up here. The closest thing we get is an approximation of “future-shock.”

The Future of Media = Many Small Pieces, Loosely Joined Matthew Ingram's GigaOM piece that inspired our post earlier this week. No news here: traditional media’s ad revenue streams are drying up--the print industry has been watching that leak for years, wondering and hoping but not acting swiftly or aggressively enough. With insight, Ingram’s article focuses on the ways the media industry can perhaps turn this around, and it’s not about one big easy solution. While digital-native media has the upper-hand, traditional media should look to multiple (smaller) sources of digital revenue that have the potential to add up fast, such as custom publishing and e-books, as well as leveraging “in-sourced” skills and live events that are already a part of their business.

The Four Worst Innovation Assassins It’s easy to claim a corporate culture that promotes innovation, yet it doesn’t seem to be a top concern for many companies. Even if you have a leader who seemingly champions the cause, writes innovation expert Scott Anthony, he or she may actually be the single greatest obstacle in innovation's way. Collected in this short list are four of the leader personality types to watch out for, and a simple solution for promoting innovation in your organization.

Physical Media is Dead — Long Live the App Om Malik on the decay of physical media, the rise of digital media and why apps are the “right metaphor” for the new world. Agreed, but how long before we’re going beyond apps into another type of “container”? This is a fast, rushed, shaky new world, as Malick mentions, and while apps are just starting to take a real, firm hold, it is unlikely they are our most satisfactory content-delivery model. But he brings up a great point near the end--if advertising agencies don't already have a new approach for the new world, they're going to need one if they don't want to find themselves disrupted in the wake of broader media and marketing disruption.

It’s Not About Instagram — It’s About Mobile The title says it all, but the point is worth discussing: Facebook needs to monetize their mobile app and mobile web presence, which they are not currently doing. If they continue on that path, their revenue and valuation will end up taking a serious hit. While on its surface Instagram is a photo sharing application, the more important reality is that that team built a wildly successful social experience that was mobile at its core. So Facebook's Instagram deal really represents a serious push into mobile, and should be a signal to everyone else (if proof was needed) that having a solid mobile computing strategy and a clear plan for monetizing your mobile assets are the keys to the future of any media company (traditional, digital or social) and--for that matter--any brand that wants to maintain consumer relevance and engagement over time.

am expanding on Doctor's news-centric take to include all types of print publishers.

For those who have been following my work over the years, the argument that big results come from thinking small may sound familiar. microMARKETING encouraged brand marketers to make this very same shift. And at the time (I can't believe my book is nearly two years old!) I encouraged them to do so by eschewing traditional media's big boys in favor of brand-as-publisher strategies that would empower them to be the media and engage their audiences directly, and by forging relationships with consumer content creators (in the book, micromavens) who were already building their own micro-media empires and gathering audiences of their own. Granted, at the time it was de rigueur for anyone waving the social media flag to foretell the death of old media -- even so, one of microMARKETING's dirty secrets is that it isn't really a social media book. It's an integrated marketing communications book masquerading as a social media book; and even if I didn't say it often enough back then we all know that the path to the best results lies not in trading-in the old in favor of the new, but in finding newly compelling ways to combine the right channels to have greater im

pact than ever before.

Nonetheless, the overriding message in microMARKETING was simple: that brands and their agencies could no longer rely on the easy option. The "one big thing" (whether it's a Super Bowl spot, full page ad in the Times, a Yahoo! homepage takeover, or even a big bet on some shiny new social media juggernaut) to deliver the kinds of returns they expected, and would instead need to be agile, experimental, innovative, and intelligent in combining many, many small things that - in the right combination - would result in truly impressive big results over time.

Fast forward to today... Doctor and Ingram are essentially arguing that thinking and acting small aren't just the keys to the future of marketing, but also the keys to the future of the media business that has since its inception been supported largely by marketers. While their analysis focuses on the hardest hit of the traditional media channels (print in general, and to a large extent newspaper) their thinking applies equally well to broadcasters and even the now-struggling first generation web portals. Even if broadcasters have been qui

The media business struggles from two fundamental problems. And two paths to evolution.

The first is a matter of business model. Media companies are - for the most part - looking to replace two massive but dwindling revenue models (subscriptions and advertising) with two shockingly similar revenue models (paywalls and advertising), in an age when consumer media consumption patterns are in a state of constant flux and brand advertising choices are virtually unlimited. The problem is that the loss of traditional dollars generally exceeds the digital dimes these two models are capable of adding to the top line. The solution? More sources for the digital dimes. Rather than attempt to replicate the familiar old models that no longer resonate so well, media companies need to diversify their models to create a wider variety of (mostly) smaller revenue streams that, all together, will drive stability if not growth and also evolve their businesses into entirely new areas. Doctor prescribes a handful of innovative moves - from moving upstream from advertising to marketing and becoming a service provider to other media companies, to ramping up custom publishing and making the move from disrupted to disruptor by entering the fast-growing ebook market. If he can envision a half-dozen new models in the span of a blog post, surely a seasoned media pro can envision dozens from in the trenches. Therein lies problem #2.

Problem #2 is a matter of business culture. Having spend decades (if not centuries) becoming overwhelmingly successful by being really really good at one or two things (capturing massive audiences for walled garden content, and collecting insertion orders from brands looking to advertise to those massive audiences0, it is now difficult for media companies to adjust to the new-found need to get really really good at now just two, but 20 or even 200 things. While there are certainly exception to the rule and I know for a fact there are some very smart and innovating outliers chipping away from within even the most traditional media giants, the rule stands that media cultures aren't generally built for agility, random experimentation, rapid and radical innovation, or gutsy start-up style disruption. To be frank, these things remain challenges for most marketer cultures as well. Don't even get me started on most agencies... Sure, innovation happens but, as Ingram points out in his GigaOM post, "many of these still feel like afterthoughts or side projects rather than a coordinated plan of attack on multiple fronts. The ones that are trying the hardest always seem to be the digital natives, or the ones with the gun to their head." We don't need bolted-on matching luggage. We need true multichannel innovation. And to get there traditional-first media companies will need to adopt a new digital-first mindset that drives new business and monetization strategies, incubates new digitally-minded talent within the organization or brings new talent in from the outside, and spawns businesses-within-the-business at a staggering rate. And all of this, of course, requires not only the creation of an innovation culture but also the development of a proper company-wide innovation capability spanning people, process, technology, partnerships and ultimately new measures for performance.

Thinking small is no small change. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. It is. And the significant effort and even more significant level of discomfort are more than outweighed by the strength of the foundation you'll build for the future of your business. To quote Ken Doctor, "Overall, it’s much better to move into the future with a half-dozen revenue streams — even if some are now just trickles — to stick with only two big-but-slowing ones. It should be more lucrative than selling the same old things. And maybe more fun, too."